i'm just this guy, you know?

if i’m the disabled one, i shouldn’t have to accomodate you. stop demanding that disabled people accomodate abled people. you’ve got it backwards.

Darren Criss, on public reaction of uploaded AVPM on YouTube. (from Detroit Free Press)

my 19 years with Major Depressive Disorder (via hands-full-of-hospital-bands)

This kind of exploded into a long thing, so I’ll post it here. tw: death. > something that makes me sad when I think about it Death, and dying. It’s so stupid. I’m a proud follower of transhumanism: my interpretation of it is that everybody should be able to overcome any limitations that they want to. Nobody should be forced into anything, but if someone consents to something like getting a brain upgrade or a robotic body, then by all means that should be possible. In terms of death/dying specifically, I strongly believe that every human should be allowed to live until such a time as they choose to die. The fact that people die in random accidents and unexpectedly, or even expectedly from illness or old age…. it upsets me more than anyone could imagine. I love my family, and my friends; and I care deeply about the welfare of every single person I’ve ever encountered. The knowledge that there will come a day where I will lose everybody close to me, unless they lose me first, is just so upsetting and not okay. I don’t want to experience the world without the people I love. I can’t imagine living in a world where the most wonderful people I know don’t get to live in it with me. And I’m painfully aware of the fact that, no matter what I wish, people will die. And people do die, everywhere, all the time. I have to try very hard to not think about that, because otherwise the sadness overwhelms me and I’m unable to do any of those things you’d expect a human to be able to do [and I can’t really go “hey, boss, sorry I can’t come to work today, I’m really sad because somebody I never knew died”]. The people I talk to tend to dismiss this as some sort of childish fantasy, wherein someday I will “grow up” and people I love will die and I will eventually “be okay” and come to terms with it, because that is how things are. And, you know what? That is not okay with me. My feelings are summed up pretty well by this section of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star, they won’t tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they’re old enough to bear it; and when they learn they’ll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed! You are not invincible, and someday the human species will end you. I will end you if I can, by the power of mind and magic and science. I won’t cower in fear of Death, not while I have a chance of winning. I won’t let Death touch me, I won’t let Death touch the ones I love. And even if you do end me before I end you, Another will take my place, and another, Until the wound in the world is healed at last… [http://hpmor.com/chapter/45] …. yeah, this does make me sad.

The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer number of experiences I could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I’m sitting here refreshing my inbox. ~~~ Sometimes, I have these little moments of clarity. It’s like, everything seems to be lined up perfectly, just for a moment. Everything is crystal clear, and I feel like I understand everything, all at once. And then it passes. Some people might say that it’s a sign of mental illness – I don’t know what it’s called, exactly, but it’s up there on every bipolar screening test: “Do things ever feel vivid or crystal clear?” ~~~ We live trapped in loops, reliving a few days over and over, and we envision only a handful of paths laid out ahead of us. We see the same things each day,  we respond the same way,     we think the same thoughts,         each day a slight variation on the last,            every moment smoothly following the gentle curves of societal norms. We act like if we just get through today, tomorrow our dreams will come back to us. ~~~ The world hurts. I don’t know how everybody else doesn’t feel it; and for a while, I never realised that they didn’t. ~~~ Imagine if someone you love died, today. Imagine how distraught you’d be, how broken. How many people would be devastated, how deeply it would cut through your lives - Today, 150,000 people have died, or will die. That’s all of the pain I would feel if someone I loved died, only hundred and fiftythousand times over. Every single day. ~~~ And no, I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know how to jolt myself into seeing what each moment could become. But I do know one thing: ~~~ The world hurts. I was discussing with someone today about cognitive load, in particularly how it relates to neurodivergent people – your brain is constantly working to process out extraneous stimulae, like the sound of the fan whirring in the background that’s keeping you from melting, or the feeling of your clothes on your skin, or the sound of your heartbeat rushing in your ears. Except, for someone with some form of processing disorder[0], your brain isn’t so good at filtering out all of that stuff, and so you have to, on some level, consciously deal with it. And that takes mental effort, and so there’s less of it to divide up amongst the other important things. Often, people say that they have no idea how I can deal with that all of the time, every moment of every day. For a long time, I didn’t even realise other people didn’t. ~~~ The solution doesn’t involve watering down my every little idea and creative impulse for the sake of some day easing my fit into a mold. It doesn’t involve tempering my life to better fit someone’s expectations. ~~~ Every day the air-conditioning turns off at 6:14pm. If you point this out to people, they’ll go “oh, yeah”, as if they’d noticed, but only in the back of their mind somewhere, never to be consciously thought of unless you bring it up. ~~~ It doesn’t involve constantly holding back for fear of shaking things up. ~~~ I’m not like everyone else, in some ways. I am the product of my experiences; moments strung together into a cohesive whole. My life is made of little boxes. What I choose to do with them makes me me – what you choose to do with yours makes you you. I’m just like everyone else: human. ~~~ This is very important, so I want to say it as clearly as I can: FUCK. THAT. SHIT. ~~~ – Dreams [xkcd] [0]: processing disorder, as in “auditory processing disorder”, “sensory processing disorder”, “visual processing disorder”.